50 Social Media Stats to Kickstart Your Slide Deck

On her social media and PR blog, Commentz, Sarah Evans and her staff compile a lot of stats. She cherry-picked the most relevant for marketers to share with Ad Age .

1.
"Social media accounts for one out of every six minutes spent online in US." (Journalism.co.uk)

2.
"Seventy-seven percent report that they use social media to share their love of a show; 65%
use it as a platform to help save their favorite shows; and 35% use it to try
to introduce new shows to their friends." (TVGuide.com study via TVNewsCheck.com)

3.
"Facebook users are overall more trusting than non-internet others. Pew reported, 43% of survey participants were more likely than other internet users to feel that most people can be trusted." (Pew Internet via Social Media Club)

4.
"22 % of all grandparents in the UK are using social networks, according to Mashable.
The study, which collected results from 1,341 grandparents from the UK, showed
that 71% of grandparents who use a social network use Facebook, 34% are on
Twitter and 9% use the business social network LinkedIn." (Mashable via Social Media Today)

6.
"The 'Weinergate' scandal caused a significant drop in tweeting politicians. According to VentureBeat, after the scandal 'the
number of tweets by Republican members of Congress dropped by 27 percent, while
those of Democrats dropped by 29 percent.'" (VentureBeat via Marketing Pilgrim)

8.
"It only takes 20 people to bring an online community to a significant level of activity and connectivity." (Ning via TheNextWeb)

9.
"Nearly twice as many men (63%) as women (37%) use LinkedIn." (Pew Internet via prsarahevans.com)

10. "In the last election Google was the largest player -- the Obama campaign directed 45% of
its online campaign dollars to the search site." (Advertising Age)

11. "59% of adult Facebook users had "liked" a brand as of April, up from 47% the previous
September. Uptake among the oldest users appears to have been a major factor in
this rise." (eMarketer)

12. "In 2010, 29.3 million readers read some 270 million pages of Post journalism each month, a
record for The Washington Post. Of that , 28.1 million did so online and, while [Washington
Post] brought in 4.2 million new readers on average each month compared to the
previous year, [they] also lost some 35,000 print subscribers in 2010 alone." (Forbes)

16. "Mobile is one of the fastest-growing platforms in the world. With 40% of U.S. mobile
subscribers regularly browsing the internet on their phone and a projected
12.5% of all e-commerce transactions going mobile by the end of the year, it's
a channel that you need to be aware of . According to Google, mobile web traffic
will surpass PC traffic by 2013." (60 Second Marketer)

21. "Nearly half
(42%) indicated that if they've already allocated a portion of their marketing
spend to social media, they would increase this spend over the course of the
year. Only 8% of those surveyed indicated that they would decrease social media
spend." (The Next Web)

22 . "13% of online
adults use the status update service Twitter, which represents a significant
increase from the 8% of online adults who identified themselves as Twitter
users in November 2010. 95% of Twitter users own a mobile phone, and half of
these users access the service on their handheld device." (Pew Internet)

23. "According to
HubSpot, small businesses plan to spend 19 percent of budgets on social media
vs. only 6 percent in larger businesses. A similar gap is shown for blogging
with 10 percent of budgets for small business vs. just 3 percent for
large." (Hubspot via ClickZ)

24. "33 percent of
its worldwide traffic is inside the United States." (Problogger)

26. "In early
March, Google removed from its Android Market more than 60 applications carrying malicious
software. Some of the malware was designed to reveal the user's private
information to a third party, replicate itself on other devices, destroy user
data or even impersonate the device owner." (Network World)

27. "Groupon is on
track to bring in between $3 billion and $4 billion in revenue this year alone.
Facebook's 2010 sales were reported to be only around $2 billion in its sixth
year of existence." (Knowledge@Wharton via MSNBC)

28. "A study of
24,000 consumers across the 16 largest countries found that those who are most
connected, living on the cutting edge of social media tend to be more
'prosocial' than average, being more likely to do volunteer work, offer their
seats in crowded places, lend possessions to others and give directions."
(TheNextWeb)

30. "Recent
estimates put less than 10% of the population using Twitter, far less than
other social sites." (Advertising Age)

31. "More than 3.34
million mentions were recorded over a one-month period of people making social
asks." (PRsarahevans.com)

32. "David
Poltrack, CBS Corp., announced that , based on a new research study, 'age and
sex don't matter when it comes to increasing TV ad effectiveness.'" (Forbes)

33. "An average of
40 percent of the traffic to the top 25 news sites comes from outside
referrals, the study found, with Google Search and, to a lesser extent, Google
News the single biggest traffic driver." (via AFP)

34. "Almost
one-in-four South Africans use social media as a tool to look for work, but are
concerned about the potential career fallout from personal content on social
networking sites." (Kelly Group via BusinessReport)

35. "The percentage
of US parents who allow their children between ages 10 and 12 to use Facebook
or MySpace more than doubled from 8 percent a year ago to 17 percent now." (via
NY Post)

41. "Twitter
reported that the network saw more than 4,000 tweets per second (TPS) at the
beginning and end of Obama's speech [re: death of Osama Bin Laden]" (AllTwitter)

42. "65% of all
social media related to the royal wedding has come from the U.S. in the past
month [April]. The U.K. has been responsible for
just 20%." (USA Today)

43. Re: the Royal
Wedding: "911,000 wedding-related tweets were tracked in the past 30 days.
That's about 30,000 per day and accounts for 71% of all social media." (USA Today)

44. "According to
NPR's internal usage data covering January 1 through mid-April, users who
request audio — maybe a station stream, a national newscast, or NPR Music
content — view twice as many pages as those who only read the apps'
content. On average, audio streamers rack up 4.2 pageviews per visit versus 2.4
for the text-only crowd." (Nieman Journalism Lab)

46. "Traffic from
social media has highest bounce rate. [...] If you're looking for 'hyper-engaged'
readers, those that click through five or more pages on your site, forget the
guy who came from Twitter. A link from another content site is three times more
likely to be engaged, and someone coming in from search, is also above average."
(Marketing Pilgrim)

47. ""Digital services
accounted for an estimated $8.5 billion (28%) of the $30.4 billion in 2010 U.S.
revenue generated by the 900-plus advertising and marketing-services agencies
that Ad Age analyzed." (Advertising Age)

49. "Nearly seven
in 10 tablet owners reported spending at least 1 hour per day using the device,
including 38% who spent over 2 hours on it. And while just 28% consider it
their primary computer, 77% are spending less time on desktop or laptop PCs
since they got a tablet." (eMarketer)

50. "According to a
Network Solutions survey, the use of social media among SMBs has grown over the
years, rising from 12 percent in 2009, to 24 percent in 2010 to 31 percent
currently." (Search Engine Watch)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Evans
is owner of Sevans Strategy a public relations and new media consultancy. She blogs at PRsarahevans.com and hosts the #journchat Twitter chat for journalists and PR professionals.